The invention relates to the use of a cleansing and/or care composition, comprising at least one cleansing and/or compound, which is viscous, shear-thinning and thixotropic, for impregnating a pile of absorbent supports.
It also relates to a cleansing and/or care composition and also to a cleansing and/or care article.
It also relates to a method for manufacturing cleansing and/or care articles.
There are currently numerous preimpregnated supports, of the wet wipe type, on which cleansing and/or care products have been applied beforehand, which are used instead of the conventional dry, generally cotton, pads that the user impregnates at the moment of use.
Thus, the cleansing and/or care product may be a product for cleaning spectacles, glazing, tiled or parquet floors, a polishing product for furniture, a wax-based product for the upkeep and cleaning of wood, a cleaning product for kitchen countertops or else a waxing type product for cleaning and caring for leather.
One field particularly affected by the use of such impregnated supports is the field of body hygiene products comprising a skin cleansing and/or care product, in particular of the makeup remover type, or a skin cleansing and/or care product for babies.
In all these fields of use, these preimpregnated supports avoid, on the one hand, transporting and handling additional containers that contain the products to be impregnated and make it possible, on the other hand, to only deliver the amount required for the envisaged use.
The methods for obtaining these preimpregnated supports mainly differ from the conventional methods used to date for manufacturing the base support in that they provide a step of impregnating supports with a composition suitable for the final use of said supports.
In the case of a cosmetic use, especially removing makeup from the face, the impregnating products are generally aqueous or hydoralcoholic lotions, or liquid oil-in-water emulsions.
However, the current impregnation technologies, such as spraying or soaking, do not allow supports to be wetted in a sufficiently homogeneous and reliable manner when the products are too viscous.
This drawback is particularly pronounced when a pile of supports is impregnated by means of a single injection of liquid at the top of the pile.
It is especially observed that the viscous liquid can hardly diffuse into the supports positioned in the bottom part of the pile.
Moreover, for the supports placed in the upper part, the impregnation is not carried out in a homogeneous manner, the liquid only spreading over certain areas of the supports, the other areas being totally free thereof.
In order to solve the problem mentioned above, the solutions envisaged to date have consisted either in being limited to the impregnation of liquids that are not very viscous, or in impregnating the supports individually and no longer in a pile.
These solutions however prove not very satisfactory.
In the first case, the range of products that can potentially be used at this level is excessively limited.
Thus, in certain cosmetic applications, where the creamy and unctuous nature of the cosmetic composition is very important in the eyes of the users, the limitation on the impregnation of liquid that is not very viscous does not allow such products to be provided as preimpregnated wipes.
Moreover, the impregnation of fluid compositions into a pile of absorbent supports, such as cotton pads, generally causes a gradual diffusion, over time and from the top to the bottom of the composition in the pile: the composition is therefore no longer distributed homogeneously in the pile during a relatively long storage time.
In the second case, it is necessary to use a particularly complex and expensive technology to ensure a good impregnation of each of the supports, while substantially decreasing the production yields in comparison with those obtained during impregnation in pile.